


About Time

by fishydwarrows, TempusNoKitsune



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Deviant Connor (Detroit: Become Human), Fluff, Hank Anderson Swears, Idiots in Love, M/M, Minor Character Death, Minor Character(s), Minor Injuries, Minor Original Character(s), POV Connor, Questionable fashion, Slow Burn, Time Travel, kinda back to the future au but not really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-22
Updated: 2019-06-22
Packaged: 2020-05-16 12:40:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19318381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fishydwarrows/pseuds/fishydwarrows, https://archiveofourown.org/users/TempusNoKitsune/pseuds/TempusNoKitsune
Summary: It’s all something out of a kitschy Sci-fi movie. There’s autonomous cars, what was once paper is now digital, and androids have more or less successfully won their freedom. Of course, topsy-turvy doesn't just stop at a little strange or unbelievable. What should have been an easy in-and-out case turns into nothing less than a shitshow, and suddenly Hank and Connor have the fate of their future placed completely in their hands. It’s so easy for things to go wrong even without the newfound awkward and tense filled air that flows between them.A.K.A.  Hank and Connor are sent to resolve an incident with a crazy 20 something working in an illegal electronics ring only to be blast 30 years into the past.





	About Time

**Author's Note:**

> Here's my fic for the Hankcon 2019 big bang with art by the amazing fishydwarrows!

 

It’s been raining nearly all week, keeping what would have been a balmy 75 degrees, at a cool and even 60. It’s been a wonderful opportunity for Connor to try out a few of his new outfits. For quite a while he had stuck to piecemeal parts of his old cyberlife uniform along with some of Hank’s old t-shirts and button downs from a box labeled for donation in his garage. Recently, however, since he’s received a semblance of back pay for his work with the DPD, he’s had the opportunity to go out and purchase some clothes of his very own. Given the temperature and common inclement weather, he’d purchased a knee length pea coat and a pair of traditional yellow rain boots. Hank had snorted at them at first, but Connor’s caught the faint twitch of his lips that signaled he quietly approved.

His boots squeak quietly as he walks through the aisle of the workroom, a paper cup in one hand, and in the other a traditional paper file stacked on top of a light blue interface pad. Both are part of the paperwork to be completed from their most recent closed case. It was nothing big, a fairly standard domestic issue between a divorced couple, the majority of the paperwork is due to the subsequent property damage. Both parties are not worse for wear, as any potential projectiles or physical altercations were, in a majority, taken by walls, floors, furniture, and the facade of both of their houses. Their sentences are not of consequence, as that fell upon the county court, and Connor can’t say that he wasn’t happy to be first and foremost a detective and interrogator, rather than a general government programmed android.

He places the pad and papers on his desk before circling around to Hank’s desk, propping himself up on the surface and placing the cup next to him.

Hank looks up at him shortly, his terminal lit with the dry details of the case, his portion of the paperwork half open on the surface just below, “That for me?”

Connor smiles just slightly, and he flips off the top. 

“Yes. 16 oz Americano, 1 shot of espresso, two natural sugars, and,” He quickly dips a finger just below the rich brown surface and pops it in his mouth before smiling again cheekily as Hank’s nose scrunches up, “No cream.”

“Come on, it’s gonna taste like burning sugar!”

He gives his head a slight shake and slips off of the desk before gliding over to his own.

“No it’s not. Besides, you should be grateful that I got you a shot of espresso at all, rather than focusing on the lack of fatty cream.”

Hank lets out a huff, but picks up the cup anyway as Connor connects to the terminal interface and connects it to the small pad, the surface lighting up in a flurry of code. He quickly begins sorting, filing and filling out documents before their joint desk vibrates lowly. It’s a relatively new alert system, similar to what an old police scanner would do, alerting them of a sitting from the regular patrol that Fowler had singled them out for in particular.

Hank throws a short dirty look over his shoulder, something that only Connor really sees, before heaving out a heavy sigh and pulling up the new information. Connor leans over the partition slightly, peeking around at Hank’s computer as the files pop up.

“Sounds like there’s some tech-high crazy causing trouble in the underground.” Hank shorthands for him, giving him a look that’s ultimately more fond than it is dirty as he reaches over and pulls the information straight from the lit terminal.

The issue seems to fit the crude summary. The man in question is one Alexsander Slovis, born 2010 (age 28), no prior criminal record, graduated from Lawrence Technological University in 2034, worked in IT for human resource operations for Cyberlife. The picture provided with the man’s profile is nice, he looks fit and trim and professional. The case was first called in through several minor disturbances. Other than these particular disturbances, Alexsander seems to be an upstanding citizen, and was even given the rank of Eagle scout before turning 18.

Connor leans back and tilts his head. “There’s nothing to point to a potentially violent encounter, and the area in which he seems to operate is largely unpopulated.”

“I’m still bringing my gun.” Hank counters shortly, and Connor just raises an eyebrow. “Shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything, Lieutenant.” He replies, mouth twitching slightly as he moves to his feet. “We should get going if you want to be able to get home in time for dinner.”

“What, now?”

Hank shifts in his seat, sitting up straighter but making no clear move to actually stand up. He has that air about them that Connor has realised means that he  _ really _ doesn’t want to do anything, and was hoping for little more than a slow desk day filled with periods of time during which he can get away with doing absolutely no work at all.

Given such a reaction Connor takes a dark sense of joy in lifting his shoulders in a still slightly mechanical version of a shrug.

“Do you think it’s a good idea to leave it for later?” He asks, moving around to push  his chair neatly into his desk, but leaving the files and accessory interfacing device in their place. “Generally speaking, I believe we’d be remiss to leave any particular leads for a later time, lest something more serious come to light.”

Connor folds his hands behind his back and overly straightens his already impeccable posture. His shoes still make a slight squeaking sound as he walks around Hank’s desk the way that he had done just minutes ago. Hank looks away from him and takes a couple of big gulps of his coffee.

“If something bad were to happen, and we were the ones to have put off investigating earlier calls…”

“Fuck you, fine.” Hank pushes back from his desk violently, grunting as he heaves up onto his feet still gripping his coffee hard enough to make indents in the thin cardboard. “Let’s go.”

Connor keeps his little smug smile to himself and nods complacently as the larger man brushes past him to the parking lot where they bypass the heavily decorated police cruisers for Hank’s beat up personal car.

It shouldn’t take them any more than 45 minutes to make it to the identified building. Though many of the calls of disturbances came from Slovis’s neighbors. They were notified that the man had been noticed driving out to an abandoned warehouse, only returning home far past midnight. 

Hank’s slightly roughed up car doesn’t stand out terribly as their surroundings slowly deteriorate from being middle class Detroit, to lower, until finally beginning to run through an area that's more construction and buildings being prepared for new businesses and apartments than anything else. It’s a fairly promising area that Connor notes has quite a bit of positive, interest based data. It’s supposed to be marketed as the new big area for young professionals and families.

The further they drive, the more dilapidated the area becomes. Connor leans slightly into the door, looking up and out of the window. He does a quick scan of the address and leans back.

“It’s this next building Lieutenant. Turn….here.”

Hank makes a low grumbling noise at being told what to do, but doesn’t make any further argument as he turns in towards a dull, looming building.

Hank slows the car to a stop in a gravel square that might once have been a parking lot. He seems hesitant to take the key out of the ignition.

“Are you sure this is the place, Con? This building looks like it hasn’t been touched in the last 20 years.”

Connor blinks at him a couple of times before opening the door. The building was once an office building, and the lower floors are giving off an unusually large amount of contradicting energy signatures. He can parce out the base energy signatures of modern technologies, however, a lot of the noice is covered by a heavy interference that he was never particularly prepared to face.

It seems that the company that once occupied the building still had a full two floors filled with an original main frame machine. The computer was running, that much was evident. How it was still working after a minimum of 68 years can only come down to the skill of Mr. Slovis.  

Hank walks up behind him as he looks up and down the building.

“He seems to be operating within the basement and sub basement levels.” Connor looks over, tilting his head very slightly. “It’d be within our best interest to approach from the south entrance of the building.”

“Whatever you say. You’re the one with the fancy metal detector.” Hank comments as he walks on towards the large metal door.

Connor huffs and walks after him. “It’s not a metal detector.”

“Potato, pahtato.” Connor’s just close enough that he can catch the slight wrinkles at the corners of Hank’s eyes. The ones that signify the slight smile that said Hank was messing with him in some way. It’s been an interesting new development in their relationship ever since the end of the revolution. Connor finds that in most situations he doesn’t mind it, though it does feed into a compilation of folders that Connor has realised is completely dedicated to Hank. These folders are filling very quickly.

The doors squeak loudly enough that Connor runs another scan, this time with thermal energy signatures. There’s a single ping from the main basement floor, and though it moves around in small, nonsensical shapes, it gets no closer to the stairs. Connor follows Hank in through the lobby area. 

“So where is this guy?”

Connor walks on ahead of Hank by just a step. Not enough for the man to feel as though Connor is completely guiding him, but enough that his movements lead their direction. It’s one of the small things he’s taken to doing as they’ve settled into their partnership more. It’s not a necessary function, but it makes him feel a better sense of equality, and has his sensory notifications flaring as their jackets brush in proximity.

“It seems that Mr. Slovis is in the basement. That’s where I’m getting the readings from.”

Hank gives a short nod, mostly to himself and cuts Connor off to hold open the door to the stairwell. This one is better maintained, likely having more use, and makes no noise upon opening. Connor gently taps Hank’s hand away from where it hovers over his gun as he goes ahead down the stairs. 

It’s easy for Connor to keep quiet as he steps down, turning the corner slowly and rescanning the room as he peeks around the corner. There’s the distant sound of metal hitting metal, and the quiet hissing of exposed electrical currents. Of course, this is all beneath the loud humming of the large mainframe that takes over the floor.

“Holy shit. I didn’t know these things even existed anymore.” Hank whispers from behind him, leaning in close enough that his breath brushes against Connor’s ear, sending sever strings of incomprehensible data running over his HUD.

He ignores the issue and steps into the room, moving slowly enough that his feet make no noise as they touch down on the cracked linoleum. Hank knows to stay relatively behind as Connor tests out the waters with his preconstructive abilities and technologically based reactions.

All things considered, Slovis is very easy to sneak up on, and even with Hank’s still less than stealthy approach, Connor is able to catch the man completely off guard. He does a quick scan to assure that Slovis is not armed before instituting the most effective preconstruction.

Connor lunges forward and grabs the man’s forearms just below the shoulder, pulling them tight behind his back and readying his leg to strike the middle of the back in case of a violent reaction.

“What-what-!” Aleksander struggles a bit, more out of shock than anything, eyes wide in panic.

“DPD, kid.” Hank butts in, sliding around them to take a look at the mess of metal pieces and wires laid out in front of them. “You’ve been bothering some of your neighbors, and-” Hank draws out the word as he taps one of the objects with his toes, ignoring the sharp inhale that Slovis takes in, “pretty sure you’re doing some illegal deals here.”

“Don’t do that.” Slovis bites out, pushing back into Connor enough that he has to redistribute his weight to keep from moving too much.

“What?” Hank kicks against one of the pieces again, and Connor picks up a fizzling energy signature that has him peering around the slight obstruction of Slovis’s head. “Like this?”

The man pushes back some more, but this time Connor is prepared for the pressure. The heat transfer from Slovis’s body has gone up by 2 degrees, he’s beginning to perspire, and his stress levels are rapidly climbing.

“Hank-” Connor starts.

Hank turns towards the rest of the splayed out pieces, and moves around until he gets to a glowing green piece in the center. Hank taps it with his foot slightly, as if testing to see if it will bite him. Connor takes note of the thin copper wires connecting the pieces, and blinks rapidly, LED spinning yellow.

“Hank don’t.” 

Of course, the man pays him no heed as he’s wont to do when Connor tries to tell him not to do something. He shifts just a bit and his feet slip a bit as Slovis continues to push back. There’s a moment in which his pre-constrictions tell him that he needs to either release the man, or take the possible damage of being slammed back into the machinery behind him. 

Connor’s back hits a section of mainframe with considerable force, switches pressing uncomfortably into his back, with minimal damages to his chassis. Slovis lets out a huff, and spins out of Conor’s arms, leaving his LED blinking in a confused pattern. He only just catches the frightened look in Slovis’s eyes as the man makes a mad dash towards the stairs.

“What the hell? Connor what-”

Connor is turning and running towards Hank before he even has the time to fully process the situation. There’s a high whining noise, and he feels the supple leather of Hank’s jacket before it feels like the Earth has fallen away from underneath his feet.

 

…

 

Connor’s world comes to in bits and pieces. His sight is the first thing to come back online. Everything is mostly dark, a hazy gray settling over him. As he blinks his eyes and his sensors adjust he’s able to parse out that they’re in the same place, but there is a dense population of people moving around above them, and the mainframe is whirring away at a stable rate. He shifts, pausing as he realizes that his body is pressed all along something soft and warm. 

“Hank?” He questions softly. He’d shielded Hank as they’d gone down, hoping to take the brunt of whatever blast was going to occur. However, a quick inventory tells him that everything is there, and nothing is even remotely damaged

The man lets out a low groan, and twists just a bit between Connor’s knees.

“Con, what the fuck happened?”

Connor lifts himself up, leaning back on his haunches. 

“I’m not entirely sure, Lieutenant. The energy signatures surrounding the instrument that you were kicking seemed to allude to some sort of explosion or at least a power overage. However, I have sustained no damage, and the machine no longers appears to be here.” 

Hank blinks blearily up at him before seeming to fully come to, his face reddening instantly. 

“C-Con, can you-uh…”

Connor tilts his head as Hank’s body temperature begins to increase rapidly, his systems easily cataloguing every response. He stores Hank’s micro expressions without even thinking, and wiggles a bit in place. When the man beneath him lets out what can only be classified as a squeak, a rush of thirium fills his cheeks.

“Oh! Of course.” He leans back enough that his toes are flat against the ground, and presses himself up to a standing position. “I apologise for the prolonged proximity.”

Connor extends a hand downwards, only a bit surprised when Hank’s hand falls into it easily. Despite his hand all but disappearing within Hank’s own, he’s able to pull the man up with enough force that Hank rocks forward into Connor’s chest.

“Jesus, Con. You don’t have to pull my fucking arm out of the socket.”

“Your bones are still in their place, Lieutenant.” Connor steps back, systems reeling from the sheer force of input that came from Hank bumping into him. Bodies flush momentarily once again. His LED whirls yellow once as he pulls everything back under control. 

He reminds himself of the priorities. The most important of which not being the feeling of the coarse hair of Hank’s beard against his skin, or the size of his hands, but rather the fact that though everything places them in the same position, it’s as though the building is fully functioning instead of being in its rightful decrepit state. 

“Did we lose him?” The question is saturated in rhetoric, something that Hank is well versed in.

Connor pays him little mind this time, moving towards the stairwell. There’s a set of footsteps that vibrate at an increasing frequency. 

“Con-”

Connor shushes the man behind him and shifts towards the door. His legs shuffle out into a fighting stance as, processors pre-constructing possibilities in the split second that the door cracks open. He rocks back unsteadily as an unassuming teen walks into the room, nearly bumping right into him.

Connor tries to run a facial ID, and blinks rapidly when he gets back nothing. No feedback, just a well of empty space. For the first time in his existence he’s completely, jarringly, alone in his own head. 

“Wuh-” The boy stands there for a moment, holding on very loosely to a stack of paper files. His hair is bleach blonde and he's wearing three polos, all with the collars popped. “Who the hell are you guys?”

Connor doesn’t have to look behind him to know that Hank is stepping forward, ready to pitch into a conversation that he feels can only turn sideways. Something is terribly, terribly wrong, and Hank isn’t aware of his surroundings enough to parse it out yet.

He quickly falls back onto his primary social functions, plastering an assured and pleasant look on his face.

“Ha, sorry you probably haven’t seen us before. We’re with IT.” He explains, pushing his hands into the shallow pockets of his jeans. 

The boy looks him up and down before his shoulder hunch up a bit.

“Cool, yeah.” With that seemingly cleared up, he walks off past them without as much as a glance back at them.

Before anything else has the chance to happen, Connor leans back and snatches up one of Hank’s hands, pilling him bodily up the stairs and, subsequently, out of the front door. The parking lot is almost completely full, and he weaves them through the cars. He scans the area and locates a clear alleyway in between the offices and a building that shouldn’t be  anything more than ruins.

Hank, who up until this point was just a bit too caught off guard to react properly, swings Connor around and up against one of the concrete walls. It’s not an unfamiliar position, in fact it was one of the first ones that they had found themselves in.

Hank makes a low growling noise, his cheeks the light side of ruddy.

“What the fuck did you do that for?”

Connor flinches just slightly at the angry tone. He hasn’t heard that from Hank in...a while.

“Something isn’t right, Lieutenant.” He lets his head fall back against the concrete. “This wall shouldn’t exist. This building was condemned and torn down in 2034.”

Hank just stares at him for a couple of seconds before lifting his head to scan the length of the wall. If the man were an android Connor is sure that his LED would be a blinking yellow, and his systems would be overheating.

“I can’t connect to any servers. There’s not any feedback to show blocked channels, and my scans aren’t showing any of the base routes for the main servers. Nothing from Cyberlife or the cell phone companies. I’m getting some low level readings, but...they’re not the right frequency…”

There’s a small feeling of panic welling up inside him. It's something that he’s not familiar with, having only experienced it once or twice before. His chest begins to hurt as he reaches out again, opening all available channels only to find nothing more than the weak waves from before. His shoulders begin to curl in the more the pain spreads.

“Con, hey.” Hank snaps in front of his face a couple of times, causing him to snap his eyes up to meet frosty blue. The pressure that the larger man had been applying to his collar lets down significantly, turning into a softer embrace. “You okay?”

“I-I’m….I’m okay…”

“For an interrogation android you sure are shit at lying.” Hank moves to step back, but Connor’s arm moves before he even realise that he’d given it his permission, hand gripping tightly into the front of Hank’s button down.

“I…”

Despite looking a bit surprised at the action, something in Hank seems to soften and he steps forward again. Close enough to embrace Connor, but not quite taking the final step.

“Its...I’ve never not had something to connect to. It’s very...It’s very quiet.”

“You gonna be okay?”

To be completely honest he’s not sure, however, the fact that he’s facing something of an internal crisis at the moment is less important than the whole of the situation which has caused said crisis.

Connor gives his head a little shake, “I’ll be fine, Hank. I’m more...concerned about where we are.”

“Whadda you mean?”

“This is...and isn’t where we were before.”

“I’m seriously starting to doubt your definition of okay here, Con.”

“You heard what I said earlier, yes? This building shouldn’t even exist, and yet it’s here. The offices that we just came out of should have been empty and dilapidated. Those offices were full of workers.”

“What are you trying to tell me?” Connor’s not uninformed, he knows that despite the time that Hank spent under his severe depression that his detective capabilities hadn’t weaned. There’s a look in the man’s eyes that tells him that there’s a general suspicion, but he complies with a response regardless.

“I’m not entirely sure. But if I were to suspend disbelief I might suggest that we’re no longer in our own time or universe.”

Hank just stares blankly at him for a moment before shaking his head.

“No way. There’s no way. Are you trying to say that we’re, what? In some futuristic sci-fi movie? That can’t exist. This isn’t real.” Hank leans back enough to look around in a futile attempt to glean the truth from their inanimate surroundings.

“Hank,” Connor begins, tentatively keeping ahold of the front of Hank’s shirt, feeling as though he couldn’t let go at the moment if he wanted to, “Did you ever think that Androids would exist?”

Blue eyes flick back to him and the man’s shoulders heave in a heavy sigh and he leans back in.

“Fuck you. Just...Fuck you.”

The words held no actual venom, and had come to convey something almost fond. His research had provided him evidence that Hank’s particular generation often took to using such expletives or unsavory names to refer to those that they care about when joking or stressed. 

“Okay-” The man leans back to his normal posture, and Connor looks back and forth between his eyes as something akin to begrudging defeat began to settle on them. “One, when or where the fuck are we? Two, how the flying  _ fuck  _ are we supposed to get home?”

Connor squeezed his hands, grounding himself in the stretch of the fabric beneath his fingers.

“Since I…” He takes a shaky breath. “Since I can’t connect to anything, we’re going to have and try to figure that out in a passé way. Perhaps if we could find a public computer or-”

“A newspaper.”

“Hm?”

Hank isn’t listening to him any more as he makes a move to step back, his movement is hindered by Connor’s iron grip on his shirt. He stares at his hand for a moment, watching almost forlornly as Hank pulls back once more and slips through his fingers. 

“Newspaper’s always got the date up at the top. Regardless of whatever shit they’re spewing they’ve always gotta have the date.”

Connor watches as Hanks moves rapidly towards the mouth of the small alley, running a short scan before following dutifully. Any suspicion that may have arisen during their hasty exit has dissipated, leaving them with a clear path for any of their...research.

“You got a phone?” Hank asks over his shoulder.

Connor almost stops in place, but settles for staring holes in the back of Hank’s head as he respond.

“Yes, Lieutenant. Of course I do. Why would I ever use my direct line connectivity when I can carry around a uselessly inferior piece of technology.”

Hank almost skips a step as he lets out a surprised bark of laughter.

“Right well, not sure it would work any way. Guess that means we aren’t getting a taxi.”

Connor tilts his head as he lengthens his stride until their shoulders brush together. He quickly pulls up information from his last search, before their arrival to...wherever they were now. 

“Theoretically the nearest bus stations should only be about 2.5 miles from here.”

“Worth a shot then, isn’t it?”

 

…

 

The walk isn’t terrible, though they’re lucky that the weather is clear and mild. He feels a bit encouraged when more and more cars start to drive by, the area becoming more densely populated and public as they walk away from the row of office and industrial building lots.

“Oh man.” Hank hasn’t said much, but it hasn’t been an uncomfortable silence. Though Connor’s not quite prepared for the sudden outburst. “I completely forgot that the dorms were over here.”

Connor is sure that his LED is a bright yellow as he looks over to where Hank’s eyes have settled. By force of habit he tries to run a scan on the building before him, only to come away with a HUD full of error messages that leave him shaken enough to stop walking. Hank stops only a few steps later and turns back.

“You okay, Con? You’re spinning wheel of death’s on red.”

He shakes away the messages and squeezes his eyes shut tightly once, as though to shake away the red and gray threatening to take back over his vision.

“I’m-yes...I just...I can’t scan…”

Hank shifts uncomfortably on his feet before walking back to Connor’s side, and sliding a warm hand up between his shoulder blades. 

“It’s uh...It’s gonna be okay Con. It won’t be for long.”

Connor leans back into the hand slightly, grounding himself through the slight stability that it offers. The hand clenches in a way that he thinks is meant to be reassuring and he begins to move forward slowly.

“What were you trying to scan?”

He swallows, an involuntary humanism.

“The-you said that the building was a dorm, so I wanted to get the background on it.”

“Well hell, I can tell you that.” Hank lets out something of an awkward laugh and his hand shifts but doesn’t pull away. “The Detroit Police Academy dorms are over here. Spent a good 5...6 months there? Guess that’s right, but it definitely felt longer.”

Connor blinks a few times, capturing the image of the building and filing his own information away for some peace of mind, if nothing else.

“When was that?”

There’s a long exhale to his side that has him looking over to see that the apples of Hank’s cheeks are dusted a blotchy red.

“Fuck, like...ah fuck, 20...30 years now?”

He allows his head to tilt, smiling softly when Hank’s eyes dart over to him.

“Did you like it?”

“Like it?”

Connor just hums, turning his attention back to the building as it gets bigger and bigger.

“I mean, yeah. I probably wouldn’t have become a cop if I hadn’t.”

“That makes sense.”

“You’re sensors really are fried aren’t they.”

Connor turns his head, mouth open and an offended retort on his tongue when he hears something that makes him stop in place.

“Hank!” It’s an unfamiliar voice. He tries to place it with his available samples, but none come up as a match. He tracks the sound as far to the source as he’s able to without his advanced processors, and finds a human not all too far off from them. “Yo Anderson!”

Hank seems to notice this one. His head snaps forward from where he had begun to look at Connor with an increasingly worried expression.

Once he’s able to zoom in enough to the individual he finds them partially turned away from the two of them.

“Do you know that voice?” He asks quietly, not turning his head away as his neural network lays mapping down, slowly but surely. Slightly hindered by his lack of wavelength connection.

“I-”

“I was running, what the fuck is wrong with you!” The words aren't in an angry tone, in fact they sound familiar, joking, sarcastic, but most of all they sound like-

“Fucking fuckity fuck fuck. What the shit? What the actual motherfucking, holy-”

“Hank please. We should move to cover.”

“Are you fucking kidding me right now?”

Hank stays rooted to the spot, hardly blinking as his face loses all colour.

“Hank-” Connor tries to inject as much of his currently rising stress levels as he can ad they begin to peak.

Its when “Hank” and the un-named other individual begin walking towards them that Connor switches from the hide and retreat tactic, to damage control. Connor drops his hand to intertwine his fingers with Hank’s as casually as possible, and reaches up a hand to run through his hair and purposefully mess it up enough that the careful style messily covers his LED as much as possible -for safety's sake. Connor closes his eyes for a moment, LED flickering yellow as he quickly reviews couples from his memory.

Hank makes a startled coughing noise and whips his head in Connor’s direction when the android leans heavily into his side, looking up lovingly at him for a moment before squeezing his had a little bit more tightly than comfortable and edging them back towards a walk.

The other Hank seems to be handing off a couple of things, concealing some more than Connor would think necessary for anything that two friends would need to. Upon zooming in momentarily he’s able to identify the bag that passes between them as containing marijuana, which should be legal...but they’re certainly acting as though it’s not. Connor leans his head on Hank’s shoulder, stress levels dropping slightly as the man seems to catch on to his little ruse. However, they’re still walking quite slowly, and Connor is positive, based on Hank’s own stress levels, that he looks at least a little lost. This is only confirmed when, after the individual not called Hank, branches off, jogging in the other direction with a jaunty little wave, and the young man looks directly at them before stepping up in a little jog of his own.

“Hey, you guys look kinda lost. Can I help ya get somewhere?”

Hank’s heart suffers a slight arrhythmia. 

Connor looks up, eyes mapping out everything before he even thinks about it. Everything matches up...Matches right up to the files that Connor had first been given when he was originally assigned to the Lieutenant. He pulls in a tiny breath and plasters on an innocent smile.

“Oh, hello!” The other “Hank’s” eyes flick over from where they’d automatically settled on Connor’s Hank. “Well, we’ve been to Detroit before, but I’m afraid that we gave our taxi the wrong address, so we’re a little bit lost.”

What Connor now begins to dub as “young Hank” in his head, lights up as he takes in Connor. Cool blue eyes roam up and down his body, and he has to make an effort not to shy away. He’s not particularly used to this sort of look. 

“Well, I can try my best to help!” Young Hank offers with a wink. “Name’s Henry, you can call me Hank.”

The young Hank stretches out a hand, and Connor releases his Hank’s, very limp, hand to shake the outstretched one. Young Hank holds his hand a bit longer than what Connor would deem socially acceptable with such intense eye contact. There’s an uncomfortable warmness that surges to his cheeks as he pulls his hand back.

“I’m-” He catches himself very quickly, evaluating the possible outcomes if this was, perchance in the past, and quickly pulls up a list of names from his internal database. “Bryan.”

The young Hank hums almost approvingly, and Connor has to bump his shoulder into his Hank’s shoulder to spurr him into motion. He coughs, drawing young Hank’s attention.

“I’m uh-”  _ Please, for the love of God, don’t say Hank. _ “Michael…”

Young Hank lifts an eyebrow, but doesn’t say anything more.

“Well, where are you guys trying to get to?”

Connor tilts his head slightly. He can’t exactly ask to go to the precinct without sounding incredibly suspicious, and given the fact that he’s around 90.28759% sure that they’ve somehow traveled into the past, he can’t be assured that any of the places they would normally go to would accept them.

“Um, I guess just downtown would be fine?”

Young Hank’s mouth quirks up at one side, and he ushers Connor forward to his side as they begin walking again. Hank drops behind them slightly, and Connor throws a small glance back that’s enough to meet eyes with the other man to tell that, despite his somewhat spaced out look, his detective tendencies have taken over enough that he’s following along. 

“So you two here on vacation?”

Connor rubs the edge of his coat a bit, using the texture to calibrate some of his system.  He’s a little startled when young Hank bumps into his shoulder and smiles at him privately.

“I-um…” The artificial heat rises to his cheeks once again. “Yes, we haven’t been out of state in a while and I’d never been to Michigan before but, uh...Michael was born here, so…”

Young Hank stays pressed up against his side, and Connor’s not sure if that’s comforting or a breach of his personal space. 

“That’s nice! Wish my dad would’ve taken me on on vacations like that!”

Connor gives a short nod before processing, he hopes that the yellow of his LED doesn’t shine through at all, but he can’t keep the amused smile off of his face. It’s hard to swallow the laugh that threatens to make it past his lips when he hears his Hank let out a choked cough.

“It is nice of him, yes, but he’s not my father.”

Young Hank stumbles over his feet and looks back over his shoulder a couple of times. “Oh shit! I’m sorry, man.”

His Hank mumbles something about it being okay as young Hank fumbles around a bit awkwardly before seeming to build his easy confidence back up.

“Well...uh, how long are you in town for? Maybe I can make up for um...for that by showing you guys around while you’re here.” 

It should be an easy no. It’s dangerous to spend more time with what is almost definitely a younger version of Hank. However, if this is exactly the case, having someone from the time that is familiar with the time and space could be very useful to getting back to where they need to be.

“Ah-” His Hank begins, but of course, not only do Connor’s processors work faster, but he’s also right next to the young Hank, and seems to be holding the majority of his attention.

“That would be wonderful, Hank. Thank you!” He butts in, leaning more towards young Hank in a way that he hopes seems friendly rather than forceful or awkward.

The man seems to take it well, leaning right on back to brush their shoulders.

“Alright!”

The rest of their walk is spent shifting back and forth between a sort of comfortable silence and talking about little random things that Connor encourages young Hank to talk about. It’s nothing too deep, mostly mundane and far from unusual, but as they enter the downtown area Connor finds his attention further divided into figuring out how to split off, and what exactly they can do from this point.

Luckily their extended walk has given his Hank enough time to seemingly recover enough that he’s able to take over as his younger self begins to slow down and hand over the lead. Connor inwardly scolds himself for being so caught up that he’s become distracted.

His Hank’s quick thinking has them stopping outside of a moderately sized hotel.

“Well this is us. Uh, thanks for gettin’ us here and all that.”

“Sure thing, Mike!” There’s a few seconds where Connor isn’t terribly sure that Hank is going to, or even should, shake hands with his younger self. However, the two do shake hands briefly, and nothing seems to happen aside from young Hank’s attention quickly shifting as he digs around in his pockets and pulls out a beat up wallet.

Connor blinks as a small piece of paper is held out to him. It’s a ripped off piece of a fast food receipt, and it has…Connor’s cheeks flush rapidly and he shuffles a bit so that what he is sure is a spinning yellow is as far away from young Hank’s eyes as it can be.

“That’s my number. Let me know when I can show you guys around, and y’know,” The genuine smile shifts over to one side, changing the feeling completely as eyelids drop slightly over cool blue eyes, “If you ever need anything else.”

Young Hank closes with a smooth wink and doesn’t give Connor proper time to respond before taking off without really looking back. His mouth opens and closes a couple of times as he continues to just hold the number out in front of him. It doesn’t stay out in the air for very long as his Hank snatches it from his hand.

“We won’t be needing this.” Connor is only just able to rip the important piece with the actual numbers on it away enough for him to mentally catalogue the number before the thin paper splits. “Con, what the fuck?”

He shakes his head a little bit as he takes a step towards Hanks and grabs the other slip of paper and crumples them up in his hand.

“His point of view in this time could be incredibly valuable considering that he’s intimately familiar with it.”

Hank sputters a bit and his face reddens. 

“Do you disagree, lieutenant?”

“No, I uh-” Hank’s face is ruddy, splotchy beneath his thick beard, “I thought you know, doesn’t matter. No, I don’t disagree, let’s just.” The man runs a hand through unruly silver hair and throws a look behind him towards the concierge, “get a place to stay while we figure this out.” 

He nods though Hank is already well on his way to the counter. Connor doesn’t carry any money, though it’s mostly do to the fact that he hasn’t gotten any physical money  _ to _ carry around- all of his pay is in digital bank funds accessible by his individual coding. Regardless of the exchange that Hank is making over at the front counter, Connor replays the heat rising on Hank’s cheeks as he drops the little paper ball into the bin by the front doors. What would Hank had thought he would do? Someone from the past had a vague interest in him. People have had interest in Connor before. People had given Connor their numbers before. He’d never actually done anything with them, or followed through on any of their offers. Then again, Hank had never actually been there when he had been given any of the number, and likely didn’t even know that he had amassed any such attention at all…

Did Hank really think that he would consider contacting a younger version of himself out of a mutual sexual or romantic interest? Was this feeling that ran through every string of code in his systems so one sided that he was beginning to project too much?

He actually has to shake his head a bit when Hank’s hand comes down on his shoulder and begins to steer him towards the elevator. Connor takes a quick stock of himself and finds that in this state he’s easily able to override the unconscious command that filters a human looking blush to his face. He’s calm enough, schooled enough, for that right now.

They’re on the 5th, and top, floor of the complex. The room is a small corner, 1 bed, 1 bath, with a small sitting area and a kitchenette. Hank shuts himself up in the bathroom after announcing that he “needs a goddamn shower if he’s going to be dealing with time shit.”

Connor takes the opportunity to finally shrug off his pea coat. It’s a very nice one, and one of the first things that he had ever bought, but he’s be lying if it weren’t straining his internal HC systems a bit after wearing it for so long. 

He gently drapes the coat over the chair in the sitting area, and divests himself of his tie and shoes as well. Over time he’s gotten into the habit of dressing down as a means of differentiating between work time and “life” time. He drops himself heavily into the chair and lets out a long puff of hot air.

Connor was made to be a detective, to work in interrogation. All of his programmes and systems were contrived in configurations to best understand and solve problems and cases. Now, however, as he retreats into his mind palace, bits and pieces have fallen into pixelated bunches. He walks along the path, feet shuffling as his processors struggle to keep pace. To save time and reduce complications he disconnects all of the functions that are reaching out to any possible available signal. The result if a lot of error feedback before everything fully cuts off, leaving behind a static white noise.

He’s running on a limited amount of data. He wonders momentarily, as he finds the small clearing that was once home to a wall of roses, if this is what it is like to be a human detective…

Reguardless, Connor slowly folds to a seated position and begins to put together what he knows, what he’s noticed. 

They had not moved position once they had come to, but the building that should have been the abandoned office that they had started out in. However, instead they were faced with an in use place of work complete with a young intern carrying paper files down to the mainframe offices. Connor quickly reruns that particular piece of memory footage and catalogues what he can about the boy. 5’7”, approximately 18 years old, bleached hair, and three different coloured short sleeve polos with their collars popped up around his neck. It’s an odd look all together, but it’s useful information in narrowing down the potential possibilities of their current where, and possibly even when, abouts.

The simulated air whirls around him a bit. A tiny chill that makes him focus in, like the strains of code that use to keep him in line before his evolution into the deviant that he is today. Connor looks up to the sky, eyelids fluttering for a moment as the light in front of him shifts to information gathered on “Hank.”

6’ 2”, approximately 20 something years old, shoulder length honey blonde hair. He was lean but strong, and only just really had the beginnings of the beard that his Hank had fully grown out. Connor waves away the full image, honing into the face. If he could use his recognition skills to further narrow down the young Hank’s age then he could put them into a time area. He maps out the face, placing grids and tracing it out against thousands of photos of “his” Hank that he has stored in his memory.

The door of the bathroom opening with a hot gust of air startles him a bit, and he binks a few times as he rapidly pulls out of the mind palace.

“23.”

Hank, dressed just in his boxers and undershirt, pauses by the side of one of the twin beds and looks over at him like he’s crazy.

“Uh-”

“I apologise,” Connor lifts himself up slightly in the chair to better turn himself towards Hank, “Let me explain. I was attempting to calculate about what place in time we were through your younger self.”

There’s a low rumbling noise that emanates from the other man's chest before he says anything. “I’m still not completely convinced that I’m not on some sort of intense red ice trip.”

Connor blinks. “Red ice is incapable of creating hallucination this detailed. It’s unlikely to do anything more than perhaps cause one to relive times as though in a flashback like state, or perhaps to create a figure or some noises…

“Fuckin’ a, Con. Learn to take rhetoric at face value.”

“Oh…”

There’s a long pause where they don’t look at one another, but they don’t move either.

“So, uh…” Hank starts, “Did you figure it out then?”

Connor looks up and nods. “Like I said earlier, 23. Based on the “young Hank’s” face up against yours, general aging standards and discrepancies against the image that I was first given as a representation of yourself upon looking up your legal profile, I’ve determined that the man we met earlier is most likely you at age 23.”

“God damn…” Hank mutters something under his breath that Connor makes out to be,  _ I hardly even remember ever being that young _ . He decides not to comment. After all, he doesn’t consider Hank to be “old” anyway. “So that’d make it what? The early aughts?”

He tilts his head, the math done in mere milliseconds.

“2008.”

Hank makes a visibly disgusted face. “God, what a year to go back to.”

“Did something bad happen this year?”

“Huh? Yeah, but it’s pretty much the same this as every other year. Humanity existing.”

Connor’s brow furrows and Hank just levels him with a look. He gives his head a small shake at the odd sort of humor and crosses his arms over his chest. Hank, used to their semi-back and forth slides under the covers of the little bed and leans back heavily against the wall.

“So, what’re we going to do?”

Connor stands up and walks over to his own bed. It’s not something that he needs, but it’s one of those little things that Hank considers to be a “normal person nicety.” He can’t contest that comfort of being able to dress down and lay under soft blankets even if he’s doing nothing more that running through diagnostics.

“We’ll need to find a way to get back home.”

Hank lets out a snort. “Yeah, got that part myself. Got any clue how?”

Connor blows out some excess hot air and leans back against the wall in a weak mimicry of Hank’s own posture.

“Not particularly.” Connor clenches his hands up in the sheets.”There’s not exactly a certain way to go about this. As far as I’m concerned this is the first time that anything like this have ever happened. Though, even if it weren’t, due to my current...state...I would be unable to access any information on it anyway. That being said, I have a few ideas as to potentially tracking the energy signature created by whatever sent us here.”

Hank just nods, letting out a hum low enough that Connor can almost feel the vibration in his chest. “We can worry about that tomorrow. I need to pass out and catch up to wherever the hell we are, and whatever the hell we’re gonna have to do.”

He doesn't respond any more than not putting up a fuss as Hank leans over to turn off the lights. They don’t say anything for a while as Hank shifts around, moving up and down, flipping from one side to the other, and making the bed squeak and sheets rustle.

“Con?”

“Yes?”

“You think we’re gonna be okay?”

Connor shifts, stands up and slides under his own sheets and snuggling down. 

“I don’t know.”

 

…

  
  


“Hank?” Connor gently touches the man’s shoulder, but the movement is nowhere near enough to actually wake him up. 

Connor tilts his head to get a better look at Hank’s sleeping face. His mouth is slightly open and his eyes are darting back and forth behind his eyelids, a prime signature of REM sleep. 

Hank’s hair has become terribly messy while he’s slept, and Connor uses a gentle hand to comb through the worst of the knots. He’s focused enough at his task that he doesn’t take note of Hank’s breathing shifting, or his eyes fluttering open. Hank doesn’t say anything for a couple of minutes, and Connor freezes when his eyes wander back to Hank’s face and their eyes meet.

“Morning…”

Connor’s breathing subroutine has stopped, and his hand remains tangled in Hank’s now tangle free hair. He knows that his LED is blinking yellow, but he can’t seem to make himself move. Their faces are only inches away, and that soft, fuzzy feeling that had started to course through him upon looking at Hank’s face earlier is now a searing cold. 

“Con?” Hank’s hand takes a soft grip around his wrist and tugs it out of his hair, but doesn’t just let go. A large thumb rubs a couple of gentle circles on the false joint and Connor’s eyes flick from Hank’s to that particular point of contact. “Con.”

He blinks a couple of times and then flinches back as though burned. Hank’s grasp on his wrist keeps him from moving too far away. His face heats all at once and his sensors tell him that more than 65% of his synth skin has turned a pink colour. 

“Woah!”

“I-ah...Hank. I’m sorry...I…”

“Hey, it’s okay,” There’s a dusting of pink over the older man’s cheeks though Connor’s so hyper focused that it’s completely possible that it’s not really a blush, “can’t say I was expecting you to be that close though. Was I not waking up or something?”

Connor pulls in a couple of breaths, filtering his system and pushing himself into a rapid cool down. Time pauses for a moment as he retreats into his mind palace in an effort to sort himself out. His whole body is hot and cold at the same time, and everything seems to be freezing up. How could he have been so careless as to have let himself get so carried away with something so seemingly unimportant. But it felt to nice to card his hands through Hank’s hair, so feel the heat of his body, to be so close with no fear of being pushed away or invading personal space.

There’s a familiar feeling running through his body, through his processors, sparking his circuits. He pushes as much as he can away, ignoring that they automatically store themselves in one of the many drives that have, over time, become completely dedicated to Hank. He paces around the little clearing that he stands in a couple of times before he feels properly able to respond, even if he’s still running at a lower capacity. Only seconds have passed as he resurfaces, wrist still caught in Hank’s hand, their faces still only a foot apart.

“No, you did not wake up the first couple of times that I said your name…”

Hank blinks a couple of times, seems to realise that he’s still holding onto Connor, and lets his wrist go as though its burned him. Cheeks very visibly becoming ruddy now.

“Ah, sorry…”

Connor shakes his head, dismissing a couple of temperature errors as he does so.

“It’s alright. I just figured that you’d like to get up so that we have more daylight to being searching for a way home.”

Hank nods, and Connor stand up from where he had sunk to the ground after getting caught. He sits quietly on his little bed while Hank gets ready for the day. It’s the first time in a while that he’s wished for his coin again. He still has it back at home. It’s stored in the top drawer of his desk at work. However, that does him no good as he sits here now. His eyes stray to his pea coat, still draped over the chair in the small sitting area.

Hank comes back out of the bathroom in the clothes that he was wearing yesterday, thankfully he hadn’t bunched them up the night before, so he’s at least presentable. Connor squeezes his hand closed once and then flicks a large button up into the air, and catches it mid air.

“Ready to head out?” Hank asks, pulling on his jacket.

Connor stands in lieu of answer, tugging his own coat on- sans one button. 

Hank looks at him for a moment, a slight glimmer of concern in his eyes, but he must decide not to do anything about it, as he stays quiet and just steps aside to hold the door open. 

They pick up a bagel and some coffee for Hank from downstairs, and check out with no hang ups.

“So, what’s the plan, Mr. energy scanner?”

Connor looks up at the sky for a moment before looking back at Hank, going ahead and starting off in the direction that they had come from yesterday.

“We need to go back to the office building. That’s where we came from, so any still available trace energy signatures would be there.”

Hank’s stride staggers a bit and he swallow hard around a mouthful of bagel.

“But what if we run into, uh...me again?”

“What about it?”

Hank stammers some unintelligible words. “But he was...he…” There’s a pause, but Connor is not a detective model for something. He thinks for a moment, then his mouth twitches slightly. The warm feeling from earlier is back, but the panic that followed is now clouded by previous research.

“I didn’t mind him flirting with me.”

Hank coughs a couple of times. “I-you-”

Connor feigns his easy nonchalance, something that he would normally find almost second nature is now something of a trial. It feels like there’s something he really wants to say, something pushing against that hot line that he’s repressing. He’s certainly strong enough not to let that break through...isn’t he?

“Reguardless,” He starts, thankful not for the first time that he can multitask in most situations, “we have to go in that direction if I’m to get a reading, there’s no other way to go about this that doesn’t include somehow having to start completely from scratch.”

Hank cuts of his sputtering noises and resets his shoulders like he often does when he’s resigned himself to something.

“Okay, yeah…” He blows out a long breath, “Fuck, I know you’re right. How the fuck did this even happen?”

Connor looks over for a moment. “I intend to try and figure that out.”

The walk back towards the office building seems much shorter now that they’ve already walked once back into town. It would have been a much easier and shorter distance in a car, but by reducing any possible further trail they could reduce their overall footprint and avoid any possible persons that might have been working with Mr. Slovis to make this happen to them specifically. Though it was a slim possibility, the chance of someone following or targeting them was a preconstruction, and therefore, something that he couldn’t ignore.

They stop in the parking lot of the closed building across the street from the office. There are a few cars, not enough to give them cover should anyone become suspicious, but enough to tell them that the parking for the office building had overfilled. That just meant more obstacles. 

“So…” Hank drawled, shuffling his feet over the gravel in an absent minded fidgeting. “We gotta get in the building?”

Connor nods, his eyes scanning over the facade and taking inventory of entrances both conventional and nonconventional. 

“I don’t think we should just go in the front. We’re okay with our coats, but we’ll seem a little bit off. Don’t really have to worry about cameras if it really is the early ‘aughts. Whatever ones they have’ll probably be shit. Hell, smartphones are only just now a thing so these people aren’t taking pictures of every goddamn thing that they see.”

Connor blinks a couple of times and then looks back. His mouth twitches slightly. He always loves when Hank goes into his detective mode. There was so much hiding behind his gruff exterior.

“Perhaps we won’t need the young you after all, Lieutenant.”

Hank’s eyes move over to him, and if they’re weren’t a wind chill it would be very hard to explain the blotchy redness of his face and ears. “Ah, whatever!”

Connor wants to smile, he can feel the expression coming naturally to his face, but he pushes it back and shifts on his feet, leaning forward in an unnecessary visible movement to  signal his scanning.

The building specs are no different than the ones that he had gotten upon their appearance in the...past. However, now that he knows what he’s looking for he can discern a small discrepancy in the electromagnetic waves. It’s down in the lower levels, where they’d come up in the middle of the mainframe room. It’s a weak signal, something that he could have easily looked over had he not been looking for it explicitly. 

“I’ll have to get closer to get a good read on it.” He says, rocking back on his feet lightly. “The energy residue is very small, so to get the best read I need to be right on top of it.”

He begins to walk the route towards the road. It's a very short walk between the sidewalk and the doors of the office lobby. He’s jarringly stopped by his collar pushing up against the front of his neck, and hot fingers brushing along the back. 

“Woah there! Where do you think you’re going?” Hank asks from behind him, tugging on his collar a bit more to pull his back to where they’re in line with each other.

“Into the building.”

“I know you heard what I just said.”

Connor blinks. “Yes, the security systems are subpar and should be easy to bypass.”

“Yeah, but the people’ll be just a bit harder. You can’t just go waltzing in there looking like that.”

Connor looks down at himself and self consciously runs his hand over the front of his coat. “Do I look bad?”

Hank does something of a double take and runs a hand through his hair roughly.

“What? No! I mean- Connor it’s 2008, you’re wearing clothes from 2038.”

“Oh…”

“Yeah, oh.”

“Well, there are some clothing shops downtown. We could try and get some new outfits there and perhaps purchase another room for tonight.”

Hank nods slowly, his hand touches the small of Connor’s back for a moment as they get started walking again.

“Wonder if I could put this on my expense report…”

 

…

 

Connor enjoys shopping. Or rather, he enjoys that act of walking around and looking at things. His sensors and detective based software made it so that every texture, fabric, smell, colour, so on and so forth were something of an adventure for his senses. He’s not so inclined to actually buy things, even though he can at this point. Even his initial trips for things like the coat hanging comfortingly over his frame had taken hours upon hours of just walking around with no clear objective. It’s not something he gets to do often, and precisely why he’s always gone shopping alone.

He pushes his hands into his pockets, fingers finding the button that he’d popped off earlier. The shops here are much different than they are back home. Many of the doors are propped open, letting out enticing pockets of warm air and strong whiffs of cloying colognes and perfumes. They’re intense enough to his olfactory sensors that he finds himself turning into Hank’s familiar smell to get away from the unwelcome attack on his senses.

Hank huffs out what sounds like a long suffering sigh. “I forgot how goddamn cringey some of these stores were.”

Connor shuffles a bit closer to Hank’s side to avoid getting hit or pushed by the large crowd filtering through the shopping market. He half hopes that Hank’s hand will find its way back to the spot on his back that it seems to be so fond of, but he pushes that thought away as he scans the open windows.

Connor points out forward, to the biggest storefront so far. It was a clean looking white in comparison to some of the crazy combinations of colour going on, which black print and a bright red star.

“Really?” Hank asks, looking a around them, though not actually seeming to look for anything. “You wanna go to Macy’s?”

“Is that bad?” He looked in through the doors. The colours on the inside are about just as garish as all of those around them, but there seems to be something of a more promising array, and selection. “It looks more promising than many of these other establishments.”

Hank snorts. “Guess we’ll just go ham.”

Connor opens his mouth, but doesnt get the chance to say anything before they walk into the store, and Hank walks off towards a small escalator. He follows just a few feet behind, blinking with wide eyes as he takes in everything around them. The set up of the store is very clunky. There are 4 levels and each of them is filled to the brim with products. They take the escalator up to the 3rd floor, where there are different sections of clothing hanging up in little grids.

Hank stands awkwardly in the middle of the floor for a minute, and Connor squares off his shoulders.

“Let's meet back here in an hour?”

Hank raises his eyebrows as though in silent question, but doesn’t wait for an answer before shrugging. “Sure, sounds like more than enough time to find something.”

Connor smiles at him, knowing that if they were to stick together, everything would take much longer- and for him in particular, would make it much more stressful. He knows this simply from going grocery shopping with Hank several times, that their shopping styles are vastly different. Apparently he, “takes too long.” Connor can’t pretend that he hadn’t gotten a bit offended by that. He just liked to indulge his sensors. He hadn’t been alive for very long, after all, so many things were still new and interesting to him.

He give himself a little shake as he walks off in a random direction, brushing past several rows of clothing that are far too small for him. Those slowly give way to very similar clothing in different cuts and sizes. He breezes through a few more groups like this, before setting in an area with some compelling oranges and denims. 

“Hello, sir!” A young woman walks up to him. She looks to be a teenager, with dirty blonde hair in a high ponytail on her head. She’s wearing a small crop top with spaghetti straps, covered in part by what looked to be a large tracksuit jacket and a pair of large, low waisted hips. “Can I help you find anything?”

Connor is about to say no, when he realises that he has no clue what people in 2008 really would wear. He puts on a big smile. 

“Yes, please.” He flips the large button in his pocket. “I don’t really have anything in mind, I just haven’t gotten anything new in a while.”

The girl snorts, “Yeah I can kinda tell.”

She begins to walk away, waving her hand in a ‘come on’ motion at him as she walks him over to an area full of shirts and jackets. There were a lot of brightly coloured shirts, mostly cotton and some obviously overly large.

“We just got in some new Ed Hardy stuff, but I don’t think I can really see you wearing that kinda print, but…” She shifts through a few hangars and pulls out some shirts, before moving onto the next, and next, and does this until Connor has about 6 shirts to choose from. She then herds him over to some pants and looks him up and down. “Do you know what size you are?”

He nods and helps her pull a couple of different pairs out for him to try. She seems to get more excited as they continue to pick things out and gives him a big smile as she walks him over to the changing rooms. 

This he’s never done before. He’s never really needed to. He still didn’t have a whole lot of clothing, and the things that he had gotten, he’d just used his information to pick up things that he thought that he might like. There was a giddy sort of feeling to changing into multiple different outfits, even if the majority of them fit awkwardly, and looked terribly strange. By the third outfit, he realises that this is just the way that the outfits were going to look regardless. With that in mind, he adjusted his expectations and went about trying and retrying a bunch of different options. 

He probably plays around with the pieces far longer than he ought to, but he comes out with his outfit of choice before the hour is up, and thanks the girl for her help before making his way back over towards the centre of the floor where he and Hank had agreed to meet. Hank is already there, of course, and looks as though he’d probably been standing there a while.

Connor smiles and gives him a little wave as he walks up.

“Should’ve known that when you said and hour, you meant exactly an hour right on the dot.”

“Well,” Connor holds his clothes close to him, “you do have a bit of an advantage over me.”

Hank rolls his eyes, and looks at the fabric in Connor’s arms. He doubts that the man will really be able to make out much of anything from the way that they’re bunched up, but the girl that worked the section said that he looked ‘totally awesome’, so he figures that he’s okay even without Hank’s okay beforehand. They walk to the register and Hank pays with cash. He mutters something under his breath about being glad that he’d just cashed out a bunch or they’d be done for. Connor hadn’t thought about that at all, but he made a note to himself to check on just how much money Hank has had to use.

Hank bumps into his shoulder and swings the bag back and forth a couple of times. They make their way to the large men’s bathroom on the first floor and change into their new clothes, stuffing the ones that they had been wearing into the bag. Well, Hank just stuffed them in, Connor took the time to neatly fold all of his and place them so that they’ll suffer the least amount of wrinkling.

The baggy olive cargo pants hung low on his hips, and looked a little funny with their scrunchy little cuffs squeezing over his yellow rain boots, but he figured that it wasn’t all too bad. He looks at the outfit in the large mirror above the sinks. The shirt is larger than one would have picked for himself otherwise, the largest shirts that he’s worn all belong to Hank, and though he likes them very much, it is very unlikely that he would have bought them on his own. The collar is a scoop neck, with a thick black band along the neck, and subsequent thin black stripes going all the way down to the hem. 

He turns his head slightly and rubs at his LED. There’s not much for it, and he’s incredibly lucky that either no one has noticed, or simply doesn’t care about it so far. He runs his hand up through his hair and fluffs it around before shifting it awkwardly in the other direction. The stubborn curl at the front flops heavily onto the other side, receding slightly up towards the rest of his hairline, but creating a higher swoop and a messer bunch of waves than he usually has. Overall, not too bad.

The stall door to the handicap stall violently swings open, and Hank walks out running his own hand through his hair, and looking less than happy with himself.

“I hate this. I hate fashion. I hate the 2000’s.” He grumbles.

Connor smiles at him and lets out a short laugh. “I think you look very…”

Hank is wearing a pair of over-large khakis that don’t look altogether that much different from Connor’s cargos. Over them he has a large t-shirt with the words Ed Hardy on it, covered by a patchy jean jacket.

“Comfortable.” He finishes.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Hank mumbles back before looking up into the mirror. “What the  _ hell _ are you wearing?”

Connor raises his eyebrows slightly. “2000’s clothes, I thought that would be quite obvious, Lieutenant.”

Hank rolls his eyes and snatches the back off of the stall door. “Alright, smartass,” He’s smiling, and Connor hyper focuses on that wonderful expression. Enjoying the slightly hidden dimples, the cute gap between his two front teeth. Connor can’t help but smile back. “You look like an idiot.”

Connor sticks his tongue out slightly at the other man as they walk back out into the shopping area.

Hank rolls his eyes again, and bumps their shoulders together. Connor’s internal temperature steadily rises as their bodies continue to brush together. They continue on back towards the centre of downtown in companionable silence, and Connor begins to have an assortment of compulsions that he’s been very good at pushing away before. Now, however, everything is exponentially more difficult. 

He pushes away the first few errors that pop up, forcefully focusing on non-objective things. When Hank’s shoulder brushes his again, however, the backs of their hands brush briefly, and in Connor’s purposeful ignorance the very things that he was trying not to let take over end up slipping through. That is to say, his hand twitches briefly before latching onto Hank’s larger one.

Hank stiffens up briefly, which alerts Connor to his subconscious faux pas. His internal temperature hikes up a few degrees and there's a moment of panic but...Hank just squeezes his hand a little bit and they continue on walking just like that, hands together as though it was nothing out of the ordinary. The error messages are worse now, and Connor isn’t completely sure whether he thinks that that’s is a good or bad thing.

 

…

 

“I was here last night, are you sure that we can’t just have that room?”

Hank’s uncomfortable sounding voice comes from the front desk, and though Connor is a little bit more than tempted to walk over and see if there’s anything that he can do to help, he knows that Hank would rather not have him step in over something not work related. He’d done it several times before to many mixed results. 

Connor tries not to look all too out of place, but he feels vaguely uncomfortable walking around in public in such large clothes, and he’s unable to pass the time by gathering information as he usually could with his lack of access to the channels and servers that allow many of his high level detective functions. A couple of people look at him as they walk past, giving him odd stares or little smiles. Connor still doesn’t properly understand humans in his own time, so he just smiles back or tries to ignore them until Hank walks back his way. 

“Is everything alright?” He asks, shifting closer to the man and his familiarity. 

Hank grumbles, hands shoved deep into his pockets. Connor wishes fervently that he could reach out and pull one away from its hiding spot, but there’s still a residual air of uncertainty from the time that their hands dropped as they walked into the lobby of the hotel.

Hank moves on without really giving him an answer, but Connor’s not totally unused to this kind of behavior and so he simply follow the other man up to their new room. When the door swings open and Hank walks in with an awkward shuffle Connor gets a little bit of an idea. There’s only one, relatively well sized bed sitting in the middle of the room. No living space like in the one before, clearly set up more for a couple or a single person that just likes a little bit more space.

Connor feel himself swallow reflexively, which is more than unnecessary. A few system errors pop up again and he brushes them off vehemently as he walks inside as though nothing is out of the ordinary. All things considered he doesn’t really need to “sleep” at all, and it’s not as though he couldn’t do such a thing standing up. His body had no reason to go slack during any sort of stasis. Just the thought, however, of sharing a bed with Hank, who’s big warm hands he’s just begun to miss the touch of beings on a whole other wave of error messages as well as an uptick in his internal temperature.

Hank runs a hand through his hair which fluffs up upon the disturbance. 

“Sorry ‘bout this. They said there was a wedding going on or something so this was kinda the last thing they could give up.”

Connor shakes his head. They’re both shifting awkwardly on their feet, nether really sure what to do, and not quite willing to sit down on the bed at this point. 

“That’s okay.”

He wonders, as his temperature continues to go up, if they’ve upset some sort of delicate balance by toeing the boundary that would have once made them drop their hands between them. 

Hank coughs awkwardly in the air between them and Connor is struck momentarially but the pure absurdity of everything happening now. They’re 30 in the past, they’ve met and avoided any possible catastrophe with a younger version of Hank. They’re dressed in clothing that won’t exist in their time, and are well on their way to Connor having the opportunity to trace back the very thing that will allow them to get back to their own time. All of this and the prospect of sharing a bed with one another is what has them frozen and mute, unsure of what to do. The revelation makes him want to do something, but he’s at a distinct loss for just what to do.

The stand there long enough for the light filtering in through to turn from its cool light blue glow to something more warm and yellow. Hank mutters something and shuts himself in the bathroom which finally snaps Connor out of it enough for him to fall to a seat on the bed. There’s something just this side of defeating about this, being the single most advanced piece of technology, and something virtually unobtainable in the time that they are in, and completely losing himself over simple thoughts of the man who’s supposed to be his closest friend.

He wishes that there was time for him to actually do some sort of cleanse, to devote more processing power to sorting this out, perhaps a soft reboot. He can’t do that of course. He needs do give all his energy into tracing their energy signatures to help get them back home, that also includes avoiding any possible shutdowns in order to retain any extraneous information or signals that might be residual in his system. He flops back onto the bed.

Why does he feel this way? What is this? Theoretically, he understands the idea behind a...well a crush, an infatuation. But applying it to himself seems so foreign, though there’s really nothing for it. It’s undeniable that he feels for Hank differently than he’s felt for anyone else, but it is also clear that Hank seems to feel for him differently than others as well. Though Connor has become much more familiar with many other people since his original activation, he’s found that the way that he and Hank act with one another is far from simply friendly or familial. 

His pump begins to feel warm simply from thinking about these things. Today was a step further into a sort of no-man's land that they’d been toeing around for a long time.  It was one thing to grab onto Hank in a ploy to seem as though they are a couple to others, and it is another to do it simply because he can, and to have it warmly reciprocated. It’s feeded something that he wasn’t ready to face, though perhaps he would have never really tried to process any of it as he has to now.

He wants Hank to come out of the bathroom just in his undershirt and briefs, his makeshift sleep clothes. He wants to reach out for the man, to grasp the worn fabric in his fingers and lean forward until he can bury his face in Hank’s chest. He doesn’t entertain these thoughts for fear of crossing boundaries he was not yet ready to face, but now...he’s unsure if those boundaries were as precarious and steadfast as they once were.

He’s pulled rather suddenly out of his reveries as Hank shuffles into the mair room. His hair is messed up in a clear show that he had been roughly running his hands through it, with tell tale signs of heightened stress levels to accompany the disarray. 

“So uh…” Hank won’t look directly at him, and Connor wonders how composed he’d be able to remain in these moments if Hank’s sky blues were staring him down. 

“Hank?” Connor shifts on the bed, pushing himself back slightly until he has to flex his toes for them to touch the floor, and fists his hands in the bedspread.He looks down quickly at the fabric as that garnered the other man’s full attention.

Hank coughs. “Yeah?”

“Do-” He struggles for words. It’s not something that he’s terribly familiar with. He always has the right words for everything, a constant plethora to choose from, and the bonus of an endless internet at his fingertips. Now he’s isolated and faced with something that there is no protocol for. “Are you okay with me sleeping in the bed?”

Hank’s eyebrows climb up his forehead. “Uhhh, I mean, yeah.” 

Connor shakes his head. It was too vague of a question. Of course Hank would tolerate it regardless, he may be embarrassed of uncomfortable, but he’d never actually kick connor out of the bed, even if he knows that Connor doesn't have to be laying down to enter stasis.

“No I-” His shoulders hike up to his ears, and he rubs his fingers back and forth over the fabric of the sheets for a few moments, allowing the texture of the fabric to settle him and recalibrate some of his haywire sensors. “Are you  _ okay _ with it?”

Hank just continues to look at him, something like he has “a second head” before settling down heavily next to him.

“Con, I might be a detective, but I have no Goddamn clue what you’re trying to ask me. So, do me a favour and pretend I’m really stupid.”

He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to say anything aloud. He doesn’t want to voice the things that have been difficult to think about, the things that he has a hard time believing. What will happen once he releases them out into the world around them? What-

“Me. Are you okay with  _ me sleeping with you. _ ”

“Well, fuck.” 

Connor snaps his mouth shut, mortified. 

Hank is frozen up next to him for a moment before he slumps fairly drastically. 

“If you’re trying to ask what I think you are then this is gonna get heavy really damn fast.”

Connor makes a small noise before speaking. “I...think I am…”

Hank nods almost mechanically which Connor might find funny under differing circumstances. “Okay...uh...okay. We can...talk about that I guess.” Hank runs a hands through his hair rather roughly. “Hell, we’re 30 years in the fucking past might as well talk about our feelings.”

He seems to say the last bit mostly to himself, but Connor’s caught up enough in the nerves stirring in his regulator to really care.

“I want to hug you!” He bursts out, hands squeezing the duvet in an erratic fashion. He wants his button coin, he wants it so badly.

Hank blinks, wide eyed at him. “Gotta say, that’s not what I expected. And pretty sure not what you were gonna go for but-”

Connor’s mouth opens again, but Hank raises his hand, having to actually press it against the android’s half open mouth to muffle the beginnings of words coming out. 

“You’re worse at this than I am.” Hank lets out a little huff of laughter, cheeks ruddy, before continuing. “Let’s start at the root here, huh?”

Connor slowly nods his head, silently mourning the loss of the warm hand over his face.

“What...brought this up? Just the uh...the-” Hank waves his hand around, “The bed thing?”

Connor nods, because it’s not completely off the dot. “It’s...been building for a while I think. But this whole thing...these past couple of days...shopping today and then the bed…” He gives his head a little shake, rubs his fingers along the sheets, and looks up into Hank’s eyes. 

The man looks as out of his element as Connor feels, so there’s a mild feeling of comfort that comes from that as well.

“Uh huh…” Hank shifts back and forth a couple of times. “So you’ve been...thinking about...us?”

Connor nods slowly. 

There’s a long pause before Hank coughs and slowly continues. “So...like what...how?”

Connor goes to raise an eyebrow but realises that he’d probably being just about as difficult as he would claim hank to be even though the man, at this point, is actually bearing the majority of the present conversation.

“I...ro-...mantically?” He draws the word out far longer than necessary, something that he’d picked up from Hank himself. “I’m not...I don’t have any programming around this. My social protocols are severely limited and I-...I don’t have anyone to talk to about it aside from you, which was not an option. Besides that, I value our friendship above all else, and the likelihood that any of these potential errors on my part- which I only recently came to accept were something perhaps more -would change our relationship beyond repair.”

Hank blinks at the rapid assault of words.

“I like you!” He yells out, probably about an octave higher than before. 

His processors are working more than double over time, thoughts fizzing at the edges. His core internal temperature is a good 10 degrees higher than it should be.

Hank’s hands land heavily on his shoulders. 

“I know you don’t gotta breathe, Con, but you’ve gotta calm down.” The corner of Hank’s mouth twitches slightly, like he wants to smile, but there’s still a heavy tension between them. “Think I got that bit from the rest of it, yeah?”

That, of course, doesn’t make him feel any better, but he does take the offhand advice and allow himself to breathe and expel some of the heat from his internal systems.

“Never thought I’d have to be the calm and reasonable one between the two of us.” Hank starts, hands squeezing absentmindedly at Connor’s shoulders. Connor’s own hands tighten in the sheets beneath his fingers in reaction. “You uh…”

The man heaves a big sigh before pulling away his hands in a long and awkward drag. Hank seems to be doing everything a bit more slowly now, stalling things as much as he can. Connor, in all honesty, is a bit tired of stalling at this point, considering everything. He blows out another hot puff of air, and tries to focus on the rising beat of Hank’s vitals to distract himself. It’s not the best of ideas, but it’s reassuring in an odd way.

“Guess we have been running circles around this for a while.” Hank laughs awkwardly, no longer making any eye contact.

“Yes.” Connor deadpans back, shifting restlessly. 

“So ummm-”

Connor’s legs begin jumping and his readings shift and fade away as errors blink up in his eyes. His distractions blinking out of existence as he moves his head once again and zeroes in on Hank’s face. The human has begun to mumble something or another, nothing substantial, and Connor just watches his lips move. This lasts for a grand total of ten seconds before he’s leaned forward in a quick swoop and sealed their lips together.

It’s just about as awkward as the conversation since Hank’s mouth as moving when he kissed him. It’s wet and sloppy, but it still hitches his internal temperature up even higher than before, now a good 15 over normal and comfortable parameters. He’s unsure of when to stop...to pull away or begin a new and separate kiss. In the end it’s Hank that has to pull  back.

They stay just inches apart for a few moments, Hank’s hot breath blowing out across his lips. He shivers and is surprised when it’s Hank that leans back in to reseal their lips together. This time it seems more right and intentional. It’s gentle but sure, their lips moving slightly against one another, Connor following Hank’s lead.

The sit there just trading little kisses for well over half an hour. It’s not hot or steamy, or really terribly exciting, but it’s warm and comfortable. Connor honestly hadn’t thought of it much before, but now he knows that he’ll be thinking of it often. He licks his lips as they fully pull away, his lips are slick with Hank’s spit. Hank is breathing a bit harder than normal.

After a couple of seconds of just staring at one another Hank lets out a breathy laugh.

“We’ll...I guess that kind of answers that, huh?”

Connor smiles, though he knows it’s as unsure looking as he feels.

“I like you too, Connor.” 

He perks up, blinking rapidly.

Hank laughs again. “I wouldn’t have kept kissing you just because, you know. I’m old Con, I’m not gonna just have a makeout session with anyone.”

Connor launches himself forward, pushing Hank to lay back on the bed as He wraps his arms around the larger man’s neck. He buries his head into Hank’s neck, a facsimile of the image in his mind from earlier or pressing his face into Hank’s chest.

“Woah!” Hank’s arms automatically encircle him, and it’s so much better than just holding hands. The human’s hands are larger than his, and his body temperature is higher, but not uncomfortably so.

“You should sleep.” He says, muffles against slightly scratchy skin. It’s true as well, they likely have a very big and long day ahead of them, hopefully ending with a trip back to their own time and home. 

“That’s it? We’re done with that conversation?” 

Connor thinks for a moment, rueing his lack of ability to search the internet or access a database. His LED pulses yellow before he settles on, “For now, yes.”

There’s no argument from there, through Hank does ask him to move and they shift around until Hank is finally under the covers, and Connor is snuggled up, almost half on top of him and trying to maintain as much physical contact as possible.

Hank pets his back gently as he drifts off. “If you get drenched in sweat because of this, just remember that it was your fault.”

Connor just smiles against Hank’s undershirt and allows his stasis to begin.

 

…

 

They walk back to the office building, this time pressed comfortably into one another’s sides. It’s a bit colder out than it was the day before, so Connor has purposefully heated his internal temperature just up onto human average body temperature. 

“Looks like there’s not nearly as many people here today.” Hank comments as the tread across the parking lot. 

There’s not nearly as many cars here today, and a perfunctory scan of the building does show a smaller population. It’s still a workday, but whatever it is that has the office understaffed today will make it much easier for them if they need to get by unnoticed. Their clothes may fit in much better now, but they still look casual, and Connor is honestly not terribly sure how well he’ll be able to play the part of a human in 2008 with nothing more than their short lived interactions. 

Regardless, everything should be made much better in their current situation. It’s already fairly simple for Connor to separate from Hank and slip in the front door relatively unnoticed. They haven't talked likely as much as they should have about plans before hand, but over their time working together Connor would like to think that they know each other well enough to at least make educated guesses. 

He’s a bit surprised by how easy it is to look around the doorframe near the lobby and take a good peak at the available security cameras. They’re not terribly well set up and there are plenty of blind spots, not to mention the clear lack of a security guard monitoring the visuals. He gives his head a little shake and catches up to where Hank has begun to meander down a beige corridor. Connor is able to lead them back towards the stairway that leads down to the mainframe room that they had come from originally. 

The machine is whirring away rather loudly and there’s a faint sort of burning smell coming from the already quite old electronics. Hank leans up against a wall of the electronics, completely unbothered.

“Do your thing, Data.”

Connor throws him a bemused little smile before getting to work. 

It’s difficult to tell exactly what he’s looking for, having more of a vague idea of what could help them vs solid evidence of any sort of residue. However, anything that can be used to make a connection between this time and where they came from will be as good a start as any. 

He makes a slow circuit of the room scanning every inch and running the sensitive sensors on his hands over any places that show discrepancies. Most of them are just due to the unfamiliar machinery, but there are a couple of places that he makes a note to go back to if needed. It’s not needed though as he picks of on a particularly strong electronic signal from an unassuming set of panels. These are towards the back end of the room, which makes sense given where they woke up a couple of days ago. 

He makes exact copies of everything that he finds here, trying for the most accuracy that he can so that when they head back to the hotel he has all of the information that is available here. Between the two of them its not completely unlikely that they’ll be able to figure something out, hopefully making a fix to get back to their own time won’t be as terribly difficult that he’s begun to quietly worry it will be.

He perks up at the sound of the door opening, putting him into an extreme feeling of deja vu. Hank’s already looking over at him as his head snaps over to the stairs. They catch each other’s eyes quickly. Connor narrows his eyes slightly as he processes.

If the individual sees them, then they need to look as though they belong here in a first degree attempt to pass by without issues. If the individual happened to notice that they were, in fact, out of place, then they’d need to make a play that they were working on the mainframe- something that he could actually do given the need. Either way, they needed to keep the interaction to an absolute minimum and get up and out now that he had all of the readings that he could glean from the area. 

Connor blinks, makes sure his LED is fully covered in a small tic of anxiety, before giving Hank a small smile and walking over to stand at an acceptable distance for a coworker. A pair of feet thump down the stairs and a man rounds the corner.

He’s of average height, with dark brown hair that flops down to his chin, parted in the middle. Aside from that Connor blinks with wide eyes for just a moment before turning and opening a small panel and flipping some switches as Hank looked on, feigning busy work. The man looks like Elijah Kamski, uncomfortably so. 

“Hello, gentleman.” He greets them jauntily, with a big smile, before promptly blocking a clean retreat by waiting over near the receipt area, clearly for something to print from the gargantuan machine. Hank chokes on his own spit when he finally glances over at the man, hiding it easily behind a cough.

Connor covers them by offering a short wave. “Hello….”

The man shoves his hands in his pockets and smiles wide enough to show off his teeth this time, “Kade Kamski.” He offers, stepping close enough that he can hold out his hand. “You guys here to fix that section that keeps busting up?”

Connor takes the offered hand, internalizing his uncomfortable hesitantancy, while trying to remember the name he’d picked out before. “Bryan. Bryan D’Andrea. Yes, it seems just like an issue with some of the fuses, I think. “He lies easily. 

Kamski nods thoughtfully before turning and offering his hand to Hank as well. It was a bit difficult to reconcile this man as the father of the man that they had met during the android revolution. 

“Michael Lloyd.” Hank says as he shakes the man’s hand, snickering quietly afterwards in a way that makes Connor want to elbow him, but thankfully Kamski seems to just ignore it as though it’s something that he’s more or less used to. 

They descend into something that would have been a comfortable silence if Connor wasn’t painfully aware of his and Hank’s stress levels as the man continues to stand quietly by the printer, expecting them to be working on the monster computer. Thankfully, even without any prior knowledge of the machine, it’s primitive enough that connor chan play with switches and wires, using Hank’s fingers as small non-conductors as he fixes a tiny disconnect that is actually the likely cause of any issues. It’s a bit of a fluke, but he sees no harm in fixing the little break. Hank shifts anxiously every now and then, his stress levels jumping up by tens after half an hour passes and the man is still there, continuing to print and read through printed pieces.

Connor is fully unsurprised when Hank jumps a bit at the blaring ringtone of the wall phone. If he were free to make noises without sounding out of place he likely would have made a comment about the impracticality of the wired landline, but he’s quickly distracted by the worried tone that Kamski’s voice takes on right away. The conversation is broken up and doesn’t make much since from this side, but it’s clear that he’s in distress and is having to leave to pick someone up in his car.

He doesn’t seem panicked but his stress levels are significant as he makes his way back up the stairs somewhat tiredly, footsteps heavy. Connor looks over at Hank after the door audibly closes. 

“That didn’t sound very good.” Hank comments, and Connor shakes his head in agreement.

“We should wait for a couple of minutes before we head out to reduce any possible suspicions.”

Hank shrugs. “Sure. Don’t think it’ll really make a difference. You get everything you need?”

Connor hums. “Well it would be nice if the machine that sent us here had come through with us buuutt-”

Hank bumps into his side. “Alright, smart ass.”

Connor ends up busying himself with actually going through and solving a few more small irregularities with the mainframe which Hank gives a totally inaccurate, but highly amusing, running commentary for. They do this for about half an hour before Hank bumps into him again.

“C’mon, we’ve waited long enough. Lets head back and figure out what the hell to do with whatever you’ve got.”

Hank plants a quick kiss on his cheek as they seperate to walk up the stairs, leaving both of them blushing as they try to subtly leave the building. It’s easy enough but now Hank’s started a round of playful teasing as they walk. There’s little shoulder bumps, some cheek kisses, some pulling at each others clothes or pushing each other off of the sidewalk. It’s a fun and comfortable, if not slightly childish, atmosphere being fostered between them until they sober up at the sight of blue and red lights.

Here they can’t be the cops that they are back home. Here they’re just citizens walking back downtown, but it doesn’t stop their immediate reactions to seeing a plume of dark gray smoke rising from behind a tipped over semi-truck. There’s two ambulances already parked off to the side. One with the back doors open with what must be the truck driver seated in the back opening with some minor lacerations and a blanket around their shoulders. The paramedics don’t, however, seem to really be doing anything about the small sedan that comes into view. 

The car is very obviously on fire, and the shadowy looking figures inside don’t seem to be moving at all. Connor’s walk stutters to a stop, but Hank doesn’t seem inclined to argue as they look on.

“Well fuck.” Hank scratches at the back of his head . “Must be pretty cut and clear if they’re not trying to get ‘em outta there.” He’s very seriously uncomfortable, tangible anxiety, some panic. Likely small symptoms of PTSD from...

Connor shakes his head and, though there’s likely no point in it, scans the car. He pulls in a breath through his teeth and grabs onto Hank’s upper arm hard.

“Hank, there’s a life sign in that car.”

“Fuck-”

He pulls away, walking over to the scene when Hank grabs his arm in an attempt to stop him. “Con, you shouldn’t.”

Connor looks back at him, “I have to, Hank. I can’t just let them die.”

Even though Connor would have pulled away, and done what he thought was right, reguardless, this makes Hank drop contact and allow him to walk on. His walk turns to a bit of a jog as he weaves past the officers and paramedics on scene that go after him. The chassis of the car is hot, so he turns off his pain receptors before wrenching the door open, popping the lock. His skin recedes almost immediately, but the heat and smoke have kept the humans far enough away that he’s sure no one is close enough to see it.

Seeing the figures in the front gives him a moment of pause. It’s a couple, both fairly bloodied and very obviously dead. However, in the driver seat is Kade Kamski, which makes the woman his wife and-

Connor’s attention turns to the back seat where there’s a securely fastened car seat. Sat inside is a three year old Elijah Kamski, unconscious but still alive. Connor shifts his approach when the door to the back wont shift and he can’t risk ripping it off of the hinges in a public display of inhuman strength. He can however, easily break the already heat-weakened glass and crawl in through the window. He grabs either side of the belt strapping young Elijah in and pulls until it snaps. 

Connor has never held a child before, but pulling the tiny limp body into his ams, reguardless of what he thought of the man that he had met before, he held the little form as close to his chest as possible, curling around it to try and shield it as much as possible as he climbed back out of the car. 

He tried out a fake cough as he clutched the child, stumbling a bit as the paramedics rushed forward and pulled Elijah out of his arms. He waved them off when they tried to look him over, and, satisfied that he didn’t seem to have any major damage aside from minor smoke inhalation, they let him go. 

Connor grabs Hank’s hand, interlacing their fingers, and says nothing as they quickly walk back to their hotel before anyone could come after him. Hank squeezes his hand hard when the door to their room closes, and gently seats him on the bed before kneeling on the floor between his legs.

“Hey C-”

“It was Elijah.”

Hank sputters on his interrupted sentence. “Elijah...Kamski?”

He nods, hands turning onto fists on his knees. “The child. It was Elijah.” He lets out a long, somewhat shaky breath. “If I hadn’t gone in…”

Hank shakes his head slowly before letting out a low laugh. “Who would’ve guessed. The father of all androids, only alive to make them because he was saved by an android himself.”

Connor looks down into Hank’s eyes. “What if we hadn’t come back? What if we weren’t sent here?”

Hank shakes his head again. “You can’t think like that. It doesn’t matter. We  _ are _ here, and you  _ did _ go in. So no use in thinking of the what ifs.”

When Connor goes to open his mouth to rebuff Hank surges up and kisses him. Connor clings on, and only realises then that Hank is shaking slightly. He decided to drop it, at least for now, and focus on kissing the man beneath him.

 

…

 

Connor comes out of stasis in the early hours in the morning, and has no reason to slip back under. He shifts up so that he han lean against the headboard and watch Hank’s peaceful sleeping form before pulling up all of the data from the offices yesterday. It’s easy for him to compartmentalize everything and he sections off the potentially traumatic issues from yesterday, and focuses on readings and figures. They really look no different from misbehaving computer energy signatures from the late 2030’s. It’s terribly frustrating.

At some point Hank begins to slowly wake up. Connor has to take a short break from his searching to gently run a hand through soft silver hair, this time without worry of the baby blues that blink up at him. 

“Morning baby.” Hank says, voice rough from sleep.

Connor blinks a couple of times and smiles, heat staining his cheeks. “Good morning, Hank.”

Hank lets out some grumbly noises and grunts as he moves to properly get up and dressed, and Connor presses a kiss on his scratchy cheek as he moves to go to the bathroom and get dressed. Connor decides to finally get up out of bed himself, putting on the small coffee maker on the dresser and making the bed before sitting back down on it and starting up his searching again. He vaguely registers Hank thanking him for the coffee and settling in next to him when something sticks out.

He lets out a little noise of triumph. “I think I found it!”

Hank blinks over at him after taking a sip of coffee. “Ya-huh?”

“It’s an odd reading but I should be able to copy it into a computer if we can get one.”

Hank takes another long sip of his coffee, still lagging a bit behind from sleep. “There’s probably one downstairs in the work area. Most hotels have them, but I hope you’ve got a jump drive hidden somewhere.”

“I can write it in code.”

Hank hums and raises his cup in what seems like a little cheers. “Alright then, lets go home.”

Despite everything they’re not in a terribly rush as they make their way downstairs. Hank is able to grab a breakfast muffin while Connor scouts out a plausible computer. It turns out that there is a little work area, though it’s more of a closet with one desk, a computer, and a print and fax machine. Hank leans against the desk as he eats, and Connor slides into the seat.

He sits there staring at it, checking the little buttons on the mouse and tapping on the space bar of the keyboard only for the screen to stay black. Hank snorts from above.

“Gotta turn it on, Con.” Connor gives him a little glare and looks back at the monitor only for Hank to have to lean over and press a little button just below the right hand corner and give him an infinitely amused look over another bite of muffin. 

Connor willfully ignores the look in hopes of avoiding any further testing as he easily opens up a script from there and begins rapidly coding. Now that he’s in his fingers can fly quickly over the keyboard. Hank’s amused look drops to something more in the realm of quiet disbelief- Connor hardly ever actually uses a keyboard when it’s so much more efficient to just remotely access or interface. 

“If you don’t close your mouth, Lieutenant, I’m afraid you’ve set the perfect trap for fruit flies.” 

Hank’s mouth snaps shut and the man flips him off. 

It’s the most exciting thing to happen within the next ten minutes that it takes for Connor to copy the coding to a T. 

“You don’t think they’ll miss this computer, will they?” He asks, finally pulling his hands away.

“Uhhhh, I dunno, probably just get a new one, why?”

Connor hums, “It’s not unlikely that, if this works as I want it to, the computer will be completely useless afterwards.”

“Gonna fry it?”

“Essentially, yes.”

Hank shrugs. “It’s not really our problem.”

Connor sighs. It's obviously true, but doesn’t make him feel any better about destroying the property. However, there’s not much for it, and it’s not as though they’re going to go out and buy another computer and do everything over just to spare a public piece of sub par technology. 

“Alright.” He stands up and urges Hank to do the same. The human finishes off the last bite of his muffin and stands until their chests are nearly brushing. Connor presses their bodies together and reaches around the larger man in a poor copy of the hold that he had on him when they had landed on the floor when they had first passed through.

“What-”

“It may not make a difference to be in a similar position as the one that we passed into this time in,” he starts, letting his chin rest on Hank’s chest as he looks up at the man’s face with a little difficulty, “but if the trip back is anything like the one here, I’d like the opportunity to shield or protect you from any potential harm.”

Hank’s face and chest heats at the admission and Connor cannot help the smug smile that comes to his lips as he hits launch on the coded program. By all means it shouldn’t really work, at least in theory as it’s nothing more than a series of terribly complicated code. However, they’d already been sent back in time because of this code and the fizz and crackle that emanates from the computer is enough for him to be sure that it will work before everything becomes a brilliant flash of white.

 

…

 

They don’t go back to the precinct right away. Based on the pure amount of dizzying information that hits Connor as he connects back online, and the acute exhaustion from being in another time and having to work through a difficult situation for several days only to see that you come back with very little time having passed at all, is enough for them to unanimously decide to head back home, at least for the night.

Connor doesn’t think he’s ever given Sumo so many pets. He ends up laying down on the floor with the dog half on top of them, getting big sloppy kisses as Hank lounges tiredly on the couch.

“How the hell are we going to explain this?”

It takes a couple of minutes for Connor to be able to remove himself from Sumo’s clutches. He pulls himself to his feet and brushed off some of the dog hair before going into the kitchen to gently wash away the worst of the slobber before answering.

“Well it’s highly unlikely that, even if we were to say anything about our trip into the past, and they were to believe us, that it would actually be conducive to anything.” He moves to sit on the couch before making a cautious but forward decision to sit himself down on Hank’s laugh. “Mr. Slovis was only really in trouble for noise complaints. So, we say that we went in and warned him, he agreed, and we left because it was late and you were tired.”

Hank’s hand comes up to his waist and gives him a tentative squeeze, which he leans into. He can feel a light blush spreading over his cheeks, but he ignores it to the best of his abilities and moves so that he can curl up with his head tucked into the crook between Hank’s head and shoulder. The man stiffens up a bit, but slowly begins to relax as he responds.

“So, we’re just gonna lie? What’s gotten into you?”

Connor lets out a little huff of a laugh against Hank’s neck. “Become too human, I suppose.”

Hank just snorts back and they silently agree on this story for work tomorrow before settling in and snuggling up for the next few hours, letting the TV go on quietly in the background until Hank begins to drift off. 

Connor shifts until he’s able to slip off of the human’s lap, jostling him awake. He holds out a hand.

“Come on, let’s go to bed.”

Grumbling, the older man ends up taking his offered hand and the two of them walk off to the bedroom, Connor not thinking much as the two of them strip down and get into the bed that only days ago- hours here -Hank  would have gone into on his own, with Connor alone back out on the couch. 

There were still a lot of things unsaid between them, and there’s a lot for them to process from their little trip that will likely take weeks or more to properly sift through, but he finds himself unbelievably grateful for what the stressful situation was able to bring to a head between the two of them. It’s not perfect, and it’s terribly strange, but he feels that it suits them.

Connor snuggles down under the covers and up to Hank’s side, pressing into him as the man lies onto his back and stretches out an arm that loops around Connor’s shoulders. He presses his face into Hank’s chest and presses a chaste kiss there.

“Goodnight, Hank.” He says softly.

The arm around him gives him a little hug and the man drops a sleepy kiss on the top of his head.

“Goodnight, Con.”

 


End file.
